Improving Partnership Governance in Water Services through PPPs

Overview
The Ten Themes
Background
Using the Ten Themes
Contact

The Challenge: Sustainable Water Services

Policy Principles | Implementation Guidelines | Tool Container

 

Water is not only essential for survival, but also for environmental and physical health, social stability and economic growth. However, utility managers in developing and transition countries have to cope with other challenges:

  • Fast-growing small towns and urban areas over-burden water services, leaving people without safe water. At a global level, more than one billion people are affected and more than 2.6 billion have to live without adequate sanitation.
    The challenge is to provide sustainable water and sanitation services for all.
  • Where water supply is in place, infrastructure and services are often unreliable or even eroding; maintenance is sporadic. Large quantities of drinking water entering the grid are lost or otherwise unnacounted for.
    The challenge is to make services reliable and efficient.
  • Beyond basic availability, water scarcity is increasingly becoming a question of quality. In developing countries, 90% of the waste water from human settlements and industry is discharged into rivers and lakes without any treatment.
    The challenge is to stop the deterioration in the quality of water resources.

 

      Only a question of funds and investment?

      Lack of funds and investment can be a barrier to improving and expanding services. However, attempts to manage water wisely are commonly hindered by operational inefficiency and lack of managerial accountability, political interference, overlapping institutional responsibilities and lack of appropriate legislation and enforcement. Such hindrances seriously limit opportunities to attract new investment.

       

      Main elements of sustainable water services

      Economic: Self-financing services, efficient and effective organisation

      Environmental: Balanced water abstraction, efficient water use, sanitation considerations and proper discharge to water courses

      Social: Equitable access for all, satisfied consumers, motivated workforce

      Elements of Sustainable Services

       

      Partnerships with the private sector: one option to cope with the challenges

      Governments' endeavours to turn underperforming utilities into sustainable service providers may - as one option among others - benefit from involving local, national or international private sector expertise. However, experience throughout the last decade shows how difficult change processes in the water sector tend to be: friction between partners and stakeholders over priorities means lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities, often resulting in high transaction costs and hampering success.

       

      Good governance is key

      These critical lessons demonstrate the need to focus on governance as a decisive element for successful change processes for three reasons:

      • Firstly, good water governance makes policymakers and providers more accountable to water users. This will help to improve services and secure customers' understanding of the need for change and the possible contribution of a PPP approach.
      • Secondly, good governance clarifies roles and spheres of influence between policy makers, administrations and service operators during the life-cycle of PPP processes, and therefore strengthens service effectiveness.
      • Thirdly, good governance makes an operator more reliable and predictable and therefore more attractive to investment capital.

      Experience shows that the design of effective PPPs, requires clear and transparent guidance that focuses on water governance. The toolkit accompanying these pages is designed around ten themes for good governance.

       

      Emerging trends in water & sanitation PPPs

      The paper below presents an overview of emerging shifts in approaches to Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the water and sanitation sector.  Based on interviews with 21 professionals who are actively involved in the field, the analysis focused on four areas: contracts, regulation, finance and stakeholder engagement.  The aim was to determine experts’ perceptions of where the trends in PPPs are headed.

      Download Emerging Trends Paper: English | Français | Español

       

      Tools to support decision makers, operators, consumer groups and other stakeholders

      info@partnershipsforwater.net    www.partnershipsforwater.net